Texture discriminability in monkey inferotemporal cortex predicts human texture perception

Shape and texture are both important properties of visual objects, but texture is relatively less understood. Here, we characterized neuronal responses to discrete textures in monkey inferotemporal (IT) cortex and asked whether they can explain classic findings in human texture perception. We focuse...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of neurophysiology 2014-12, Vol.112 (11), p.2745-2755
Main Authors: Zhivago, Kalathupiriyan A, Arun, Sripati P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Animals
Discrimination, Psychological
Female
Humans
Macaca radiata
Male
Neurons - physiology
Sensory Processing
Species Specificity
Temporal Lobe - cytology
Temporal Lobe - physiology
Touch Perception
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Summary:Shape and texture are both important properties of visual objects, but texture is relatively less understood. Here, we characterized neuronal responses to discrete textures in monkey inferotemporal (IT) cortex and asked whether they can explain classic findings in human texture perception. We focused on three classic findings on texture discrimination: 1) it can be easy or hard depending on the constituent elements; 2) it can have asymmetries, and 3) it is reduced for textures with randomly oriented elements. We recorded neuronal activity from monkey inferotemporal (IT) cortex and measured texture perception in humans for a variety of textures. Our main findings are as follows: 1) IT neurons show congruent selectivity for textures across array size; 2) textures that were easy for humans to discriminate also elicited distinct patterns of neuronal activity in monkey IT; 3) texture pairs with asymmetries in humans also exhibited asymmetric variation in firing rate across monkey IT; and 4) neuronal responses to randomly oriented textures were explained by an average of responses to homogeneous textures, which rendered them less discriminable. The reduction in discriminability of monkey IT neurons predicted the reduced discriminability in humans during texture discrimination. Taken together, our results suggest that texture perception in humans is likely based on neuronal representations similar to those in monkey IT.
ISSN:0022-3077
1522-1598
DOI:10.1152/jn.00532.2014